Andy Crestodina: Using AI to Improve Marketing Content Quality – Episode 18

Andy Crestodina Andy Crestodina has been developing high-quality content for his business customers at Orbit Media for more than 20 years. As they have incorporated AI into their workflows at the agency, Andy has discovered that the best use of these new tools is to improve the quality of their content and service offerings rather than simply doing more. We talked about: his work as co-founder and CMO at Orbit Media how he uses AI to do audience research, develop personas, and address their needs through gap analysis his playbook for querying and validating information that AI generates for him: prompt, response, edit how they manage prompts at Orbit Media how their business operations are evolving to incorporate AI practices into their operations how he uses AI in his marketing analytics how the comprehensiveness of coverage that AI brings to his content helps with conversion the essential skills that persuasion copywriters need to develop to work effectively with AI his concern that some LLMs may be getting worse, not better the importance of setting aside a focus on how to be faster and instead focus on how to be better - to focus on quality over quantity of content Andy's bio Andy Crestodina is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media, an award-winning 50-person digital agency in Chicago. Over the past 23 years, Andy has provided digital marketing advice to 1000+ businesses. Andy has written 500+ articles on content strategy, search engine optimization, visitor psychology, analytics and most recently, AI. These articles reach more than three million readers each year. He’s also the author of Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing. Andy gives up to 100 webinars and presentations per year and is a frequent repeat speaker at many of the top national marketing conferences. Connect with Andy online LinkedIn Orbit Media YouTube Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/yNZiusTV5kY Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 18. Creating content that gets found by Google and then persuades potential customers to act is a core competency for modern marketers. Andy Crestodina and his colleagues at Orbit Media, the agency he co-founded 20 years ago, have built websites for hundreds of businesses and created content for them that helps turn their prospects into customers. Andy uses AI extensively in his work now. His top finding? Focus on how AI can improve the quality of your work, not just your productivity. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 18 of the Content and AI podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Andy Crestodina. Andy is the co-founder and CMO at Orbit Media. It's a Chicago based agency that does website development and a lot of other marketing stuff. So welcome, Andy. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Andy: Sure, Larry. Well, thanks for having me. 20 however many years ago, 2001, co-founded an agency. An agency totally focused on the website itself. So we build sites and we improve them forever after doing optimization work, both search and conversion optimization. It's a 55-person firm that we grew strictly from organic and content marketing. So I'm someone that you might see if you go to an event like Content Marketing World, Social Media Marketing World, MozCon. I speak at a lot of search events and analytics events, but I'm an old-school content marketer who's built an agency focused on websites. Larry: Nice. Yeah. We must have run into each other somewhere along the line because I ran in that world a lot back around that same time, the early 2000s. But one of the things that's so interesting ... So we've seen this evolution together and seen a lot of the ... There's always been a lot of drudgery associated with our work and a lot of intellectual work involved and you're really excited about, and have experimented as much with, the new AI tools. Let's start with the customer and the audience analysis stuff that you do. That was really interesting to me when I read about that. Can you talk a little bit about that? Andy: Sure. If you write a prompt that says draft a blog post of 2,000 words that talks about supply chain ... You're going to get something pretty boring. It's going to be inherently undifferentiated. I joke that AI stands for average information. AI ate the internet. Literally the Common Crawl is 85% of the internet. We know that ChatGPT was trained on the Common Crawl. And it comes back and just gives you vanilla. It tastes like water. Of course it's boring. It's not for anybody. It's generic. All you did was say, write me a blog post. So all of my most successful adventures in AI, and these are daily, begin by teaching it or training it on your target audience. Now, if you've got battle tested, ideal client profiles or marketing personas, you can upload them and it will read them. Andy: You can also write prompts that will do it. Create the persona of a job title within an industry, at a company size, in a geography with an objective and a challenge and then tell me their hopes and dreams, tell me their pain points, their frustrations, their fears, and their decision criteria for selecting a company like mine. It's going to write you a persona. It will be incorrect. Of course, AI is not accurate. Don't ever expect the AI to be accurate. Go fix it and prove it, validate. And now once you've improved that persona and you believe in it and it looks good, now ask it to write an article for that persona or to draft an outline or to write a headline or to write a social post or to research a keyword or to suggest an influencer, or to do whatever it is you want to do. It's going to be far, far better results if you began that conversation with AI by teaching it who you're talking to. It's absurd for marketers to believe that they're going to get any good response without focusing on the audience. It's weird, right? I think it's weird. Larry: It is. And it's like that thing that anybody ... I'm sure you've done a lot of presenting over the years. You always analyze your audience and figure out what they want first. What you're saying reminds me that so much of the fuss the last year plus since ChatGPT-3 was introduced, has been about the generative capabilities of AI. We were talking a little bit before we went on the air and you were like, "Nah, it's not about efficiency and time saving. It's more about better stuff." And like you just said, it sounds like you're getting ... How do you feel about the personas that you're developing now compared to what you're doing before you had ChatGPT to query? Andy: Well, if I'm on a conversation with a client or a prospect or a friend and they say, "Hey, check out this thing. Is this good?" I've done digital strategy forever and I've been part of the planning process for more than a thousand projects and I'm an SEO and a conversion person and persuasion copywriting nerd. So people are frequently asking me to evaluate something they made. But it's really hard for me to quickly understand their audience. So instead, if I just begin with a persona prompt and together with the person I'm talking to, we get to where we believe, yeah, that is my buyer. Yeah, that looks like them. That feels right. Okay, good. Now I'm going to copy and paste in that thing that you wanted me to review and I'm going to have the AI tell me what it's missing. Andy: AI powered, persona driven gap analysis on any page on your website. It will immediately tell you you failed to meet your audience's information needs, or you did not address an important objection, or there's a critical unanswered question with your persona after reading this copy. Those are things it's very hard for a human brain to do. To look at something and say, what's not there. Human brains are simply not good at doing that. AI is amazing at doing that, but only if you train it on the audience first. At that point, now everyone has a sense for it. And do we agree? Do we just automatically assume it's correct? No. Here I joke, AI stands for another input. Earlier I jokingly said, AI stands for average information, which is what it does. If you just ask for general prompts, you're lazy prompting, it's going to give you back average information. Andy: But now I'm actually using it as a mini-consultant or research assistant or once I trained it on the persona, giving it a piece of copywriting and it's giving me another perspective. Do I have to take it? No. Is it useful? Maybe. But it was a fast exercise that put me in the mindset of my audience and it's got me looking at a key piece of content, a sales piece, a service page or a product page or a sales page. That exercise, sure, it is fast. I don't love it because it's fast. I love it because it's going to help me generate more leads. But that exercise is 15 minutes, less, and the improvement that you might make from that ... Dammit. I forgot to mention this important thing. Will be a durable improvement. Go fix your homepage and it'll be a better homepage for the next 10,000 visitors you'll have over the lifespan of that page. To me, this has been the most successful use of AI. Starts with the persona, give it a piece of copy, have it do gap analysis, and then just take it or leave it. But you have an opportunity now to do better, you could say, just conversion copywriting. Larry: Yeah. You're reminding me now that the common and ubiquitous modern affliction is attention when none of us have it anymore. We're incapable of paying attention for long periods of time. But these machines are just like, once they know what they're looking for, they're just on the job. They're not picking up their phone and looking at it. So their attention to detail, I get that.